Nostalgia is a hard drug. I replayed Pokemon Red easily 10 times over the years. I tried Pokemon Gold (an objectively much better game) probably about the same amount of times, but I could never get through it, because I didn’t play as a kid and thus have no nostalgia for it.

I have more nostalgia for Keitai Denjū Telefang, which I played in bootlegged form mis-labelled as Pokemon Diamond (that was before the real Pokemon Diamond was released), and even though this bootleg is horrible in quality, it’s easier for me to play than Pokemon Gold.

It’s all of it. He takes too much for the services he offers. He gives too little to his employees. He isn’t taxed enough for what remains.

It makes sense that people can earn a few multiples over the median for working hard and maybe also for taking risks.

It makes no sense that people can earn a million time as much as the median by not working hard and never facing actual risks.

This happens so often. The new version of the framework our frontend developers use has massive performance problems, which meant that our FE devs couldn’t test their changes locally, they had to upload a release to the cloud to test every single change. That reduces productivity to close to 0. A developer isn’t cheap, so you’d think the company would be quick to issue macbooks that we are also allowed to have so that they can work again.

Nope, it took 3 months for our manager to convince the helpdesk that they can get macbooks. Helpdesk originally said they’d have to wait for 2 years for the scheduled replacement of the laptops.

They could pay their employees double. Or even quadruple.

But they don’t because Gabe needs another yacht.

Epic only takes 12%, and they too have cloud saves.

If they could take 15% while being a multibillion dollar company, then taking 30% is by definition overcharging.

And that many others also overcharge doesn’t change that fact.

Steam takes 30% cut while e.g. Epic takes 12%.

No you don’t get in trouble for unfair competition if you don’t overcharge.

We are so used to billionaires being obnoxious assholes that one that isn’t obnoxious about their billions feels like one of the good ones, I guess.

He made his money (like any other billionaire) by overcharging and underpaying. He wastes his money on useless bullshit like any other billionaire. But he’s not obnoxious about it, which causes people to just ignore the part about billionaires that’s actually bad (the way they became billionaires).

There are quite a few office jobs that benefit from a decent CPU. Anything to do with images/photos/video/rendering for example.

It can’t be a loss leader.

The steam machine is, hardware-wise, just a regular Mini-PC. Valve even lets you put whatever OS you want on there. So if this was a loss leader, that would mean that non-gamers and even small businesses would buy these, would install Windows on them and use them as office PCs, with Steam probably not even installed on the PC.

With the Steam Deck, the form factor made it impractical or at least really weird to use them as office PCs. The steam machine doesn’t have that issue.

A sane person wouldn’t name the ballroom after a pedophile, but we are talking about Trump here and he constantly does things no sane person would do. r/nottheonion (don’t know if there’s a lemmy equivalent) is just another US news aggregator by now.

So it wouldn’t be completely unexpected if Trump was to do that to “own the woke left” or some crazy brain fart.

Are they really calling it the epstein ballroom?

Chris Roberts isn’t too far of, but Molyneux certainly takes the crown.

I didn’t know of the PICO-8, it looks really cool!

I really love the idea, because my current project is surprisingly similar.

I made a physiotherapy game console for kids that can be controlled using the touchscreen and inhalation / PEP physiotherapy devices and it too uses a Lua game engine.

It’s got slightly more screen real estate (240x320px), but runs on ESP32-S3, which does limit the performance somewhat. It has much more RAM, but the bandwidth to the screen is quite limited.

But it feels like a very similar kind of platform.

Coming back to SimCity 2000 today, I find it much harder to callously play with the lives of my virtual citizens. The years I’ve spent as a homeowner, parent, and city-dwelling adult make me at least pause before I willingly inflict that kind of pain on my tiny subjects.

I can totally understand that feeling! I played a fair bit of Cities Skylines. To unlock all buildings you have to inflict quite a lot of chaos to your citicens, e.g. garbage needs to pile up like crazy or crime needs to be really high.

It was almost painful to unlock these buildings.

The a is doing the heavy lifting there.

Some people enjoy studying, learning, practicing and grinding for days on end in their games. Other people have a job where they can do all that.

And the patent office too.

There really should be more oversight with the patent process.

You want to start a violent revolution over Nintendo filing bogus patent claims?

Now only someone has to dare to stand up to Nintendos lawyers. Not an easy feat.

Crazy dedication! Pretty amazing!

Minecraft: Super chill sandbox building game, but when you are lost 150 blocks deep in the mines, just found your first diamonds in the dark after you ran out of torches and you hear that hissing sound just behind you…

Sounds pretty nice tbh. I might give that a try.

That’s what happens if MBAs run the show.

Thanks for the review, that’s helpful! How much micromanagement does the game do? Does automation exist?

Important point with the DLCs, that’s really good to know!

Is Rimworld worth it? I’ve seen quite a lot of it, but it looks hard to get into (and it’s really expensive for an indie game).

I don’t really follow current games. Is there actually a huge increase of AI games?

Yeah, why would anyone buy another copy of Mario Kart with minor changes for €80 when there’s much better indie games for a quarter or less of that price?

My main reason for not buying games is that epic and amazon give them away for free.

I’ve got a backlog of around 500 games I haven’t touched or paid for, so there’s plenty to do without paying for anything.

This could have been a great “difficult choice” moment. But Pokemon games don’t do these. If you want to 100% the game, you gotta catch em all. I haven’t played Arceus, but I’m quite sure the game never acknowledges whether you caught the Shaymin or not. And with no stakes on the line, there is no “difficult choice” moment.

I was so disappointed with b/w.

The premise was really great. The “Pokemon is just dogfighting for kids” argument is a long-standing argument, and I was so stoked that they took it on.

And then they just bait-and-switched it to “The team doesn’t actually want to stop dogfighting, they just want to be the only ones with dogs to fight everyone else”. It was the laziest cop-out possible.

Cash is traceable (at least bills). All bills have serial numbers and any time cash enters a bank it’s tracked who took it into or out of the bank.

So if I withdraw cash, hand it to you and you put it in the bank, the bank knows we are somewhat connected.

Chonky as in looks or gameplay?

I also love this part:

Earlier this month, game publishing trade association Video Games Europe said the initiative’s proposals “would curtail developer choice”

Well, yes, that’s the point of pretty much any regulation about anything. Curtailing the choice of people abusing the system.

Tbh, I don’t think that Candy Crush is an extreme example. On mobile this is more the norm than an outlier.

And even on PC, there are far worse examples, like games that allow you to resell lootbox content, which is literal gambling. It’s a scratch card with extra steps.

Literally the only point for microtransactions to exist (versus e.g. expansions/DLCs) is to split up the cost into smaller chunks so that players lose track of how much they actually spent.

“I’m not paying €50 for a handful of cosmetic items” becomes “I’m just paying 20 gems for this one cool item, and then I’m going to do it again and again and again.”

The very concept of microtransactions is to hide the cost to manipulate and exploit players.

Otherwise they’d just release an expansion or a large DLC with all the content in it for a fair price.

Remember how everyone laughed at the horse armor? Well, that’s standard now.

Have you ever watched someone play Candy Crush? It’s full-on manipulative. “Oh, soo close! You almost managed to beat this level! Don’t let this chance escape! Just pay 5 gems and you can continue!”

There are certainly different kinds of players and some are more or less easily manipulated. But somebody who manages to stay rational wouldn’t play Candy Crush eitherway. If you tell them beforehand that they have to pay €200 to play this stupid minigame they’d ask you what you are smoking. But with microtransactions it’s quite easy to draw money out of somebody’s pockets.

People like that have as much agency over their microtransaction spending as a smoker has over their next cigarette or a gambling addict has over playing the next bet. The mechanics of microtransactions are often close to identical to the mechanics of gambling.

Apart from maybe you, everyone knows that it’s currently legal. Why do you so urgently want to discuss it?

But ok, let’s catch you up to speed. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. Do you want me to repeat it?

It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that. It is currently legal. Everyone knows that.

With that out of the way, answer the question or go away.

It has nothing to do with hypotheticals but with goals. Do you do the same when you negotiate for your salary?

“Do you want a raise?” - “No, I don’t deal in hypotheticals. Understand how much I earn.” - “Ok, no raise for you.”

You keep ignoring the question. The question is not “is it legal” but “should it be legal”.

Because petitions are about changing laws. They are the process through which the population can ask for a law change.

I have no idea why you keep bringing up copyright. Copyright is not a magical “get out of jail free” card that excempts you from following the law. It literally has nothing to do with the discussion at hand, same as whether this is legal right now or not. Your comments are constantly offtopic.

1: that’s offtopic. Neither does anyone advocate for buyers purchasing the copyright, nor does the copyrhight give the copyright owner unmitigated power to do whatever they want (aka disregard laws).

What the petition asks for is that people actually own their licensed copy and that ownership of the copy is treated the same as ownership of any other copy of any IP. For example, if you own a book, you too own a licensed copy of the book. This means that e.g. the copyright owner cannot legally stop you from reselling the copy (and believe me, they tried. But laws were enacted to stop that).

The owner of a book also doesn’t have the right to unilaterally revoke your license to the book. They legally cannot put fine print somewhere into the book that dicdates that you have to return the book when they ask you to or anything like that.

The petition asks the same for games:

• Publishers need to be legally stopped from limiting the buyers from using the copy they bought.

2: That is discussed in the petition as well. I recommend that you read the petition before commenting about it.

Hard to put a yes or no on this.

Yes, really really yes, if it’s done right and it works well for the game.

No, really really no, if it’s done wrong and it doesn’t work well for games.

I watched a let’s play and the beginning was incredibly cool and then the grind hit. It became even too boring to just watch next to work.